I’ve just been sent this excellent selection of slightly dangerous science videos, as part of an effort by the Institute of Chemical Engineers to persuade science teachers that health and safety is no barrier to bangs and giggles in the classroom. Some of them are rather good.

My best advice for you is to watch those videos and ignore everything I am about to say. I don’t like to mischaracterise myself as someone with spare flesh to waggle (it’s my defective personality, that’s a medical problem, and you’re not allowed to criticise me for it) but I struggle with their webpage, and because I’m bored on the coach on my way to give a talk to some medical students in Oxford about the crimes of big pharma, I’m going to paste up the email I just sent to the PR guy at the IChE.

hey

[you didn’t need that bit]

these are ace

however

here is some unsolicited PR advice from a nerd:

1. i would definitely blog this if i could embed the videos and link back to you

2. wtf is a “WVX” file, and why does it take so long to play on my computer? stream! flash?

3. why not let me as a viewer download them? you dont want to dissuade people from copying your work, that’s exactly what you’ve made it for.

4. why do i have to watch the intro on every single one?

4a. especially when they are slow to load, in a weird format, and not downloadable?

5. with that annoying library music

sorry about that. but those are nice videos, and they could be widely seen. hopefully someone will remix or re-edit them, and make something fun and easy to watch, and hopefully you will be good spirited about that, because they will be doing you a favour.

b

I know it’s boring, but time and again I find people doing potentially great things, and then shooting themselves in the foot at the final furlong by being all 1860s about it, bending over backwards to stop their message from getting out. They’ll have Twitter splashed proudly across the page, because someone’s told them it’s all cool, but no RSS feed for new content, and so on.

Now obviously I’ve become slightly interested in intellectual property issues over the past couple of weeks (and specifically in the rather self destructive views that many content providers seem to have on them). But for my own part, people often ask if they can lift bits of my book for their teaching or lectures, all worried, and I say: “yes please.”

I want to be plagiarised, I want you to steal my ideas, that’s exactly what they’re here for, and the same goes, with some vague caveats, for mainstream media. I’d prefer you to say where the stuff came from, so that people can find more of the same if they like it, but to my mind that’s a matter of panache rather than law or money. I’m not worried about income, I’m worried about being ignored by a bad old world that’s close to being an excellent one, and in fact, while we’re on that subject, when mainstream media outlets have lifted my ideas and passed them off as their own, it’s mainly annoying to me because they’ve done them in a slightly crap way (and how annoying is that?).

Right, apologies, as you were etc, time to fire up Powerpoint, here’s some more procrastination material for you before I go, but do watch the science videos as well. If you can be bothered to sit through the intro. Ten times. While you wait for the WVX file to get itself together. “10% buffering…” Nostalgic!

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
If you like what I do, and you want me to do more, you can: buy my books Bad Science and Bad Pharma, give them to your friends, put them on your reading list, employ me to do a talk, or tweet this article to your friends. Thanks!
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

33 Responses

HeXetic said,

The WVX is just a file that tells your browser, “Hey, show him this other video file over there”. Whatever media player you have set up to play their stuff (e.g., Windows Media Player) is then streaming or otherwise playing whatever the file is linked to, which in the case of the first video is:

I would guess that the problem with speed is either:
a) The connection from your computer to s3.amazonaws.com sucks
b) Windows Media Player is very, very bad at streaming things. It likes to buffer almost the whole video before playback begins.

If you punch the WMV link into your browser you can download the movie yourself… just needs a little hacking.

Any interface that requires the user to look up a file-type, or download something else (I happen to know what VLS is but I’ll bet most people interested in this won’t. They have VMP or Quicktime or iTunes), or change an extension is *broken*.

There should be a simple ‘download’ button that downloads the file in a common format that doesn’t require extensions: these days an iPod (i.e. vodcast) format option should be there too.

At the risk of being one of those arrogant Mac/Firefox users, I’ll point out that 2 and 3 are non-issues on this platform, and 1, 4, and 5 are pretty easy to address. Firefox on the Mac obligingly loads the Flip4Mac plugin to play the WMV/WVX file, and Flip4Mac obligingly offers a pull-down menu with “Save as source” and “Save as Quicktime” options. Click the latter, and there’s a lovely Quicktime copy of the video on my desktop.

Other free software easily clips out the annoying intro, after which I could pop the thing over to YouTube and embed it in my blog if I were so inclined – and if the creators had made it clear that I wouldn’t be sued for doing so.

Of course, that highlights the legitimacy of your main complaint, which is that the creators have made sharing these videos much more difficult than they had to.

It’s good to see the link to StealThisFilm. I recommend checking out their new film “The Trial” which is basically the good bits of Part 2 with some interviews with The Pirate Bay’s staff related to their (ongoing) court case in Sweden. TPB vs Big Media.

The outcome will be pretty important.

kjpalladino said,

I actually really appreciated the demos on their own, and forwarded them to my sister. She graduated last spring with her undergraduate degree in Chemical Engineering, and is teaching high School Chemistry at the FAWE Girls’ School in Kigali, Rwanda www.fawe.org/index.php/rwanda.html

gnadori said,

CDavis said,

At the risk of being a ’60s kid, are these things really exciting? The only high points of my own school science I recall were a) a teacher who underestimated the power of a balloonful of oxygen/acetylene mix, and b) a ditto who dropped a 2Kg bottle of mercury in the classroom, causing hilarious Chernobyl-type fear reactions in the authorities.

For exciting whizzbangs, my colleagues and I looked to our own experiments. I’ve yet to find anything better than a large chunk of sodium, enclosed in something well-perforated and weighty, dropped into a body of water. Old Victorian gym-room basins could be reduced to rubble.

matt_st said,

As the IChemE PR guy Ben refers to at the start of this post, this is all very useful and interesting.

I’ll be sharing the feedback with colleagues tomorrow and, in the meantime, if anybody wants to re-mix/edit the videos, I’d be keen to see the end product.

A little background on the videos: They are a resource for teachers, complete with supporting resource/instruction sheets and designed to help make school science lessons more interesting and exciting for students.

We’ve had a really, really positive reaction from the teaching world and some coverage on the Guardian’s Education website and as part of a package on BBC Breakfast TV.

I’ll keep an eye on this thread and am keen to learn any further feedback.

The TDA seems to have had a lot more money to throw at the production side, and as matt_st says the ICE has concentrated on producing support materials. For sheer spectacle the TDA videos are obviously more fun to watch and more likely to enthuse teachers and school students alike.